Doctoral Student Joseph DeLeon Stewards for Detroit City Study
From July to mid-August, Doctoral Student Joseph DeLeon was a steward with the Detroit City Study, a new co-learning space in Detroit, renovating the social and spatial relations of urban research and education. As part of the mission to open up academic knowledge production through sharing and collaboration, Detroit City Study hosted an Academic Incubator, called City Study Stewards, made up of twelve University of Michigan PhD students, working on collaborative projects in three different research clusters: Learning in the City, Place-Making, and Sustainable Humanities. Together, they stewarded the space, incubated interdisciplinary projects, and worked to translate their research into more publicly accessible forms. DeLeon's cluster, entitled Place-Making explored the diverse elements that make, unmake, and remake place and was motivated by the question, "What constitutes “place” and what does it actually hold together?"